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Monthly Archives: April 2005

A while back, I stumbled on Apocalyptica. 3 words: heavy, metal, cello. Doesn’t get much harder than that.

They’re probably most known for their Apocalyptica Plays Metallica album. I thought it was pretty good, but then I found some of their original material, which is even better. I’ve been enjoying them frequently on my iPod while running and at work (both at very high volume, hehe.) Motivational, inspirational. Definitely worth checking out.

Looking forward to seeing them live sometime, but no US tour dates yet.

Ah, harkening back to the days of my youth, I remember the Nintendo Entertainment System had a ton of cool alternative controllers like the PowerPad (kinda the grand daddy of the Dance Dance Revolution), the PowerGlove, and the funky Uforce (infrared motion detectors). I thought some of the controller ideas were kinda neat, but they never really had great game support in my opinion.

O’reilly Make (which I really need to subscribe to soon) has a fun article about turning these wacky controllers into MIDI musical instruments. Cool idea! With some interface hacking and some glue code built a pretty cool instrument. I’d really like to see a video of some real time music creation.

Other than that I’ve been running a lot. Had a particularly high mileage week last week. The weather, for central New York has been dynamite: mid sixties and sunny for almost 2 weeks. That’s pretty much unheard of this time of year in this area.